Movie theaters are extinct, virtual reality rules in this French sci-fi film

“The curtain opening on the screen. The smell of popcorn. Your generation will never know that.”

So opens the teaser trailer for French sci-fi film Ickerman, which imagines a future where virtual reality rules society. It seems like an eerily plausible future, as virtual reality makes headlines at 2016″s tech expos and even at Sundance. Just today, HitFix”s Drew McWeeny speculated on the possibility that Star Wars is the property that may bring virtual reality into the mainstream.

But in Ickerman that exciting tech has a dark side – the death of movie theaters (a nightmarish future for any film fan!) and the dangers of being so plugged into VR that you need to be rescued back to reality.

Today Ickerman filmmakers Raphaël Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard dropped a teaser trailer for the movie. The teaser is more like a proof-of-concept video – one with a Blade Runner-reminiscent metropolis and a Tron-esque freeway that the duo created with a budget of only 1000 euros. C”est très chouette.

Watch the teaser below and scroll past the video for more of what we know about Ickerman“s plot and main character.

Hernandez and Joly-Gonfard plan to shoot Ickerman in early 2017. This is the synopsis we have right now:

Taking place in a futuristic megalopolis where new technologies and virtual reality are ruling society, Ickerman follows the adventures of a nostalgic high school teacher obsessed with 35 mm films and old cars. As he tries to rescue his best friend from the guru of this digital era, he falls into his imaginary world, acting like the characters he admires, and gives back to this world a part of reality.